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User blog:JohnBobMead/Latest Releases: Uncompromising Honor, Dark Fall
The latest Honor Harrington novel, Uncompromising Honor, by David Weber, was released by Baen Books on October 2, 2018, in Hardcover and eBook. This is HH14. Dark Fall, a new novelette by David Weber set in the Honorverse, was also released. It's available as a freebie from Baen's website; the October Free Fiction release. It provides the background behind the initial colonization of the "Bolthole" system by a multi-generation colony ship whose initial destination planet was devastated by two planet killer asteroid strikes scant years prior to their arrival; it was rendered uninhabitable, and they were forced to seek another system with less than a hundred years left until their ship ceased being functional due to age. There did turn out to be a habitable planet barely within range, inside a multi-star system. It was actually a very nice planet. However, their bad luck had not ended; less than five years after they settled the initial city, a devastating eruption wiped out the vast majority of their population and totally destroyed their infrastructure. Back to the stone age they went. While their initial destination planet was searched to see if there was any sign of their expedition once the modern drive technology was develoiped, no sign was found. No one investigated the neighboring multi-star system at that time, as conventional knowledge was that such systems could not develope stable habitable planets. Near the end of the Legislaturalist Regime (1882 PD), a junction was discovered near Haven. Lo and behold, it exited in the system that the colony ship had been aimed at originally. Deemed of no military use by Vice Admiral Amos Parnell, other powerful Legislaturalists still forced him to attempt to find a military use for that area of space. So he sent out exploratory ships with instructions to be very methodical; stall for time, minimize the impact upon other People's Republic operations, got it? How methodical? Methodical enough to investigate the multi-star system... and discover the inhabited planet of Refuge, which was in the midst of their industrial revolution after climbing back up from the devastation 1300 years previously. They had been knocked back so thoroughly that they had no knowledge that they weren't native to the planet, it was that total. The star system is chock full of resources. Manticore is famous for the wealth engendered by it's three asteroid belts; Refuge had five. There's a planetary population in the low billions, with a burgeoning tech base that's high enough that it can be uplifted fairly rapidly, that can't get off planet, let alone contact anyone outside the system, and no one else has a clue that there's anything of interest there. Add that to close proximity to a junction terminus connected to Haven... The Peeps took one look around, and said, "Jackpot!" Thus, the creation of Bolthole. That's the first half of the story. The second half occurs between the first and second Manticore-Haven wars, and includes a state visit by the provisional President of the Republic of Haven... Eloise Pritchart. Go read it. What I've written does it no justice at all. Category:Blog posts